reality

This angel is outside an Antique shop where I have gotten coffee over the last few weeks.  A good friend showed me how to use the features in coffee places and so I was lugging this around and doing all that.

You can actually be an indy journo of sorts with this and a camera and a phone.  There was a man sitting across from me with two computers and boxes of files.  He said he was a financial planner.  I watched and thought to myself that he was somehow a representation of what has happened to people who used to be in offices — now they are on the road.

I’m sick to my stomach and can’t really eat at all.

When I am home it’s the worst.

The hard part is realizing how much control of my life he has taken, or that I gave away when I got married.

What is left that is me?

Anyway, I looked at this statue over the last several years.  She just sits there along with dozens of others from old mansions where there were splendid gardens once upon a time.

I wanted it, kind of like people might want a Statue of Liberty, but I can’t buy it because he controls all the money — it has been that way too, for years.

I am thinking of my mother and my grandmother this morning and of the family I came from which is very different than his.

I have to save myself.

This entails thinking of myself first and this isn’t a concept that i’m used to?  Women in my family always sacrificed themselves for others and that is how we were raised.

Only I can’t anymore.

In my stomach is a leaden weight.  It’s a mass of feelings all tangled together with realizations about these last 27 years.

There were some good times early on.

It is half my life?

I took getting married seriously.

I was his third marriage.

People have said to me lately that I am being punished for the failure of the first two.  That may be true.

I can’t let him take any more of my life away.

I just can’t.

I didn’t realize how hard the last decade was going to be.

Taking the parents to their end.

The grief afterwards.  The careers on hold.  The attempt at re-emerging on some other level.

The need to stay alive and try to keep eating and smiling.

This morning is the leaden weight churning.  Because I am here.